


this is not a fairy tale (this is not a redemption suite)

by Uncontinuous (nights_fang)



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, I love Vanya but please consider:, Vanya the affable villain in her white suit playing a soulful tune while she fucks over people, villain origin story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 22:21:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18352871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nights_fang/pseuds/Uncontinuous
Summary: This is not a fairy tale. You are not a hero.An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, power for power, that’s the way your father taught you. So you hate like you love. Ferociously. Down to your bones. With bared teeth.This is an origin story. Just not the one anyone thought it would be.





	this is not a fairy tale (this is not a redemption suite)

1.

This is not a fairy tale. You are not a hero.

You are no princess or queen. You aren’t a knight. You’re no changeling. You’re a girl. You are simple. You are ordinary. And that’s what you'll always be. Or so your father tells you. Born one of the many special magic children, and yet the odd one out. The dud child. You will never be a part of them. There is no magic lamp or stone for you to find to grant you a wish to become one of them either.

You walk through the hallways as if you haunt it. You are not the one to welcome them home for there is the robot that is your mother for that. You are but a spectre of what it truly means to not be extraordinary in a world of superhumans, and you’re confined here. Anxious and shying, a wilting thing. All you have is your violin, and the things that you could create with it.

You aren’t a side character, you’re the forgotten ones. The various nameless faceless people that populate a story to just be there. Normalcy is your fate. You are there to gawk and stare while your siblings shine in the spotlight and save the day.

Love them anyway, love them with the same ferocity of your awe of them. It is in your bones. It is in the fabric of you. They are your family and you love them.

 

* * *

  

2.

You have your violin, and your medication and it is all that differentiates you from _them_. So, your gulp down your tablets and pour yourself into learning your violin. It is all you have, for this does not need you to be superhuman. This is extraordinariness you can attain on your own. You were born normal ordinary but you will _work_ to become extraordinary.

Practice until your fingers bleed, until it is so engraved in you, easier than breathing. And then practice some more. Lose food, lose sleep, lose yourself. Find the notes and turn them into music. Learn to make your violin _sing_.

If you cannot be a part of them at least you can give them _this_. Whatever little this is.

Fail. Scowl at how it’s still all discordant noise to you. Try again.

 

* * *

 

3.

This is not a movie. You are not a protagonist.

You are but an annoying side character. Written up desperately trying to scrape by. You’re the black sheep, a relief to finally be cut off.

Your loneliness and righteous rage finally let loose is nothing but slander to the main ones for your fifteen seconds of fame. One book to finally put you in the spotlight and all it does is magnify the difference between your siblings and you. They are more, they are godlike, they are invincible even in all their failings once they leave. You are nothing but a bastion of complete mediocrity despite how hard you work to be otherwise. They emphasise this. Snap it out with gnashed teeth or silences sharper than any blade.

You’re out in the world, out away from the superhumans, and yet they haunt you. Ordinary people are better than you at doing things. And all you have for it is chunk change in talents and a famous last name and anxiety tablets and a book of exposed secrets.

Endure anyway. You’ve spent your lifetime doing so.

 

* * *

 

4.

This is not a love story. You are no damsel in distress. Leonard is no knight in shining armour.

This is a manipulation. A carefully laid trap, breadcrumbs through the woods leading you to a gingerbread house, and you take the bait. A follow-the-yellow-brick-road-to-happiness (that is a lie), and you hop skip, skippity, jump along it like Dorothy. He’s the answer to the classic question “whodunnit?” (In the living room with the hammer.) If he’s Peter Pan, he’s no Disney version. He’s the fae one, who hides blood and laughter at the human condition, and revels at the misery of turning boys into unaging monsters. And you’re no Wendy, no little girl flown away into a magic land, or a sacrifice in a china doll body. You’re a lost girl. Mindless child with birdbone wrists turned warrior. Leonard is a man with a grudge and you are nothing but the person to stand there and let him fire the gun over your shoulder, and you _are_ the gun too.

He’s the devil with honeyed words leading you to your doom. He’s a wolf licking his chops hiding in soft shirts and softer gazes and gentle words of encouragement and _oh Vanya_. Allison is right, you should know better, you’ve been taught better. But you’ve also been taught to turn off all your warning signs years back and taught to blindly follow too.

Refuse to see the truth. Fall anyway. Fall hard. He is the first person to see Vanya and not your supersiblings. He is the first to reach in and tear open the cocoon you’d long trapped yourself into, that had long become your cage. He turns it back into a cocoon, tells you metamorphosize, _become_.

He’s doing it for the wrong reasons, but it’s the _nicest_ thing someone has done for you in a long time. In forever. A part of you will always love him for it.

 

* * *

 

5.

This is not new. Your power is not new. It is old and ancient, and you were born with it. Until it was pushed so deep into you that you couldn’t find it, with words and actions and _I heard a rumour_. It was pushed deep deep down until it was as good as carved out of you.. That Allison carved it out of you on orders.

Slash Allison’s throat.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, power for power, that’s the way your father taught you. She took it away from you, you take what makes her special away from her.

 

* * *

 

6.

Until it’s not. Until you realise being the gun and the bomb isn’t fun, (even when it is and it _is_ ), and there is no happy ending, not for you. Until you realise that for everything, Allison is _your sister_ , and you _love_ her. Always have, and always will. You love her enough to be mad. You love her down to your bones, down to the music of the universe itself. You love them all that way. Too much to be a tool for Leonard.

He doesn’t like that much.

He asked you to metamorphosize, so you do. He asked you to love him and you do, you do, in the way you know the way you’ve been taught. You show him your wrath and you show him your claws and you show him your teeth.

Kill him.

 

* * *

 

7.

Go home. Go back to your family. You are still one of them. They will help. They will fix you. You were always used to loving each other with steel and ash and bared teeth anyway.

 

* * *

 

8.

You are caged. They have caged you.

Your siblings. Your most beloved. Your _family_.

They have caged you like an animal. A wild thing. Locked you away behind steel and iron and things where your wretched screams won’t reach them and they can only react with sad shrugs. Locked you away with only the sound of your heartbeat and the blood flowing through your veins and the cells in your body driving you madmad _mad_.

They love each other, but they do not love you. You love them, have loved them. Through your rage and loneliness and mediocrity. Down to your bone, down to your marrow, down to every cell in your body. You have loved until it has exhausted you. Until you were, _are_ empty. But you were never a sibling to them and now you are nothing but a beast to them, a thing to be kept locked and hidden away forever.

Bring down the house. Destroy the things they hold dear, the walls that caged you. Kill Pogo like the weak animal that he is. Walk away with your head held high.

 

* * *

 

9.

And when they come after you to take you down like the animal they think you are in front of an audience, don’t kill them. Hold them instead while you finish your piece. You have loved them for years until it has exhausted you. You have loved them through all the hurt they forced on you. You have loved them through your transformation until there was nothing left to love, until all that was left was blinding comforting rage and hate.

They don’t deserve easy deaths. They deserve to _suffer_.

You hate like you love. Ferociously. Down to your bones. With bared teeth.

 

* * *

 

10.

This is not a redemption suite.

This isn’t a hard reset. This is not a redo. This isn’t a second childhood done right, no matter _what_ they, siblings once beloved of yours, say, insist, _promise_. You’re simply back, adults in knobbly kneed and awkward bodies playing at being children again under the oppressive thumb of a cruel man you once called father. This body is yet another cage, too small for your old mind, going mad screaming hoarse inside as you try and settle in and adjust. You’re simply forced into playing the sister they never allowed you to be. Sister _dearest_. Sister who they fight for. With soft words, and touches, and hugs not meant to crush your breath out of you, and polite clapping at your violin. Sister who is included in all the games, while they play a game of cat and mouse with Reginald. Sister _beloved_. Sister, sister, dearest sister.

This is a farce.

You are the thing lurking in the shadows. The new terrors in their nightmares. The big bad wolf in the woods. The monster under their beds. You are a bomb, ready to go _tick-tick-boom_ at any second, and they’re trying desperately to defuse you.

Their promise is a threat. Five is ready to redo it every time. Unspool it. Reverse it. Force themselves, force you, already bigger than your bones, into your childhood china-doll bodies over and over again until they all get it right, no care for what it’s doing to you. Until they go mad with trying to get it right. Because they all love with ash and steel and bared teeth, and they love ferociously, and they love madly, that’s all they know, and apparently it is _now_ that they love you. And they think you empty and their love is enough to fill you up again.

Listen. Breathe. Smile. Do not gag. Play along anyway. Watch them sigh and fall into the trap. This is a fantasy and a waiting game, and you’re old hat at it.

 

* * *

 

11.

This isn’t a happy reconciliation story. It’s long too late for that.

Leave when they’re not looking. They don’t know you. They have never known you. They won’t know where to find you.

They will come searching for you anyway. Because you’re an asset and Reginald will not let you go. Because you are a monster, the Angel of Destruction, a Horseman of Endtimes, the Harbinger of the Apocalypse. You’re their _sister_ , and they’re bleeding guilty hearted heroes ready to save the world. To undo their wrongs. To save you from yourself.

Play and dance like a village performer as you drive Reginald to insanity until his brain pops. Smile like a knife as you cut Allison’s throat again. Giggle like a hurricane as you crush Luther’s lungs. As you impale Diego on his own knives. As you turn Klaus and Ben mad to their own powers and set them against each other and watch them tear each other to pieces with tears in their eyes. Laugh like a plane crash as Five takes all of you back before they die to redo it. Go back, leave, and do it all over differently this time, go back, rinse and repeat and do it again. Their suffering is a symphony, you're the composer, and conductor and they are your instruments.

You hate like you love, like you were taught, with ferocity, with wrath and madness, and down to your bones.

 

* * *

 

12.

You are not a hero. You will never be a hero. You _don’t_ want to be the hero any more.

They’re the heroes. They _will_ come for you. They will _always_ come for you.

And you will be ready for them, with your violin playing their funeral dirge and bared teeth.

 

* * *

 


End file.
